With the end of 2024 nearing, it is almost that time of year again: the peak of the college admissions process. If last year’s admission cycle is any indication, over one million prospective students are anxiously adding last touches to their Common App applications or stressing about looming decisions from the colleges they applied to early.

This year’s admissions cycle is unique because it is only the second admissions cycle since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2023 prohibiting the use of affirmative action admission programs. Effectively, this holding meant that universities could no longer use race as a factor for consideration in their decision making processes on applicants.

And it has left many institutions and students scrambling.

Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.

Nationwide, universities that relied on affirmative action as part of their admissions processes have had to reform their ways to shift away from race-conscious admissions, USC included. Meanwhile, students from marginalized communities have been left to worry about higher education opportunities available to them.

Historically, dismantling affirmative action has boded extremely poorly for underrepresented students. 

For instance, California’s 1996 ban on affirmative action in public universities led to dreadful ripple effects on university admissions. In 2006, with this ban in place, UCLA admitted only 96 Black students into their incoming class of almost 5,000. This group, known as the “Infamous 96,” did not make up a large representative amount of the UCLA student body, especially when compared to the percentages of the Black population in California in general. 

It makes sense then why many people have been worried that the Court’s affirmative action decision would cause history to repeat itself and lead to immense drops in the diversity of higher education institutions across the country. 

However, at least for California — and a few other states which have enacted similar policies — there appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel that could help to mitigate the implications of the Court’s 2023 decision. 

In early October, California Governor Gavin Newsom passed Assembly Bill 1780, banning preferential treatment in private university admissions based on legacy or donorship.

On its face, this bill and the reforms to admissions processes it would elicit might seem like they have nothing to do with affirmative action. At least in terms of the donorship element, the bill seems aimed at preventing universities from admitting students based on their ties to donors rather than their true merit. USC is unfortunately no stranger to such scandals.

So, even if deterring such occurrences is the bill’s only effect, it would do some needed good by holding universities accountable to conducting more ethical admissions processes. Even so, abandoning legacy admissions is in its own right a positive reform to college admissions, especially in terms of maintaining equal access to higher education for diverse populations. 

Data analysis by the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that 32% of all selective four-year institutions consider legacy admissions and that legacy admissions correlated with racial disparities. Specifically, the Institute discovered that admissions were 8% higher for white students and 3% lower for both Hispanic/Latino and Black students respectively when legacy admissions were considered compared to when they weren’t.

The inherent injustice of legacy admissions is perhaps best articulated by the part of IHEP’s report, which reads as follows: “Legacy policies reinforce those inequities by typically privileging White and wealthy students whose families have had access to college for generations, while limiting the economic mobility that can come from a college degree for non-White and non-wealthy students.” 

With this in mind, the consequences of legacy admissions in reducing higher education opportunities for people of color and marginalized communities cannot be denied. Accordingly, California banning legacy admissions in universities is a step in the right direction for ensuring equitable education access for people of all backgrounds and identities. 

All in all, academic institutions, I urge you to take fairness in your admissions seriously. Reform your admission processes to create equal-access higher education opportunities so that you can genuinely champion diversity like you so often like to claim. 

To students who identify with the communities that have been historically and systematically underrepresented in higher education institutions, know that you are worthy and belong in higher education just as much as the next person. 

Finally, to students in general, I hope we can all see the value of educational environments with people from a mix of identities and backgrounds and together hold our institutions accountable for supporting their existence.